| | | A comic from Vanessa Davis; an ode to National Museum of African American History, and more. | | | | | | | | | |  | | | | February 21, 2017 | Letter No. 74 | | | | | | | | | | | | Sup Lennys!
In the last month, I have taken my own advice and started to think about all the good things that still exist in the world and indulge in all the things that bring me joy, like possible vacations, friends, and real love (and I've also started listening to Incubus's Make Yourself on repeat, but that's a story for another time). It's the best kind of escapism, survival escapism.
This issue has a really good mix of stories: some help you engage with our current political hellscape, and others help you unplug from it. Lenny's contributing writer Kaitlyn Greenidge, whose writing I enjoy so much she could probably write about the Pythagorean theorem and make me love it, writes about the experience of visiting the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and thinking about her own family's history in this country, especially in a moment where our president appears to believe Frederick Douglass is alive and getting recognized more and more.
A lot of us who live in so-called "blue states" have been trying to figure out how we can be useful in this upside-down administration. Despite the fact that we are told we "live in a bubble," the truth is that we aren't safe from crazy laws and rulings affecting our everyday lives. As such, Lizzie Harris has written a really handy guide for us to know what's going on in our state, and how to make sure things continue to swing the right way.
I am excited to be able to publish an excerpt from Vanessa Davis's excellent comic Spaniel Rage. It's not really about dogs, but it's about the her very real life in the early 2000s, when she drew a comic of something that happened to her every single day. What is about dogs in this issue: an essay by the wonderful Melissa Febos about the time both she and her dog went on Prozac, and how our pets can stand in as symbols of the things we are feeling.
Last but not least, we have an interview with Elena Reygadas, the chef at Mexico City's Rosetta. I have never been to this restaurant, but everyone I talked about this interview with — including Rachel Levit, who illustrated the piece — excitedly told me they loved the place.
Anyone putting out that kind of great energy into the world is doing something right, which is all I can ask of myself right now. I hope you enjoy this issue, with open arms and open eyes, yeah.
Un abrazo,
Laia Garcia, deputy editor | | | | | | | | | | | | Sacred Space | | | | By Kaitlyn Greenidge | | |
Every morning since the election, I wake up and ask my partner the same question.
"Can we leave yet?"
"No," he says. "We're not leaving. My family started this country. I'm not going anywhere. Especially not now. This is when we stay and fight."
Half of my partner's family is old-school New York. Genuine Knickerbockers. One of the 400 who famously fit inside Mrs. Astor's ballroom. His last name is on boulevards in Brooklyn, plastered across subway stations. When we were first dating, knowing I was a history nerd, he wooed me with tales of family glory—a great-uncle who served as a doctor to a Roosevelt; ancestors who were Union generals in the Civil War; a relative who founded the Girl Scouts. He can safely say that his family has been on the side of all the things that make America great. "But we don't talk about the side that supported the Confederacy," he smirks.
My partner's inheritance is that certainty of belonging. Mine is that of figuring out how best to steal away.
My great-grandfather Matthew Trimking belonged to a tribe of Native Americans who welcomed the few Africans who managed to escape the living death of Low Country slavery for maroonage in the North Carolina swamps. The tribe was so mixed up with black, its members weren't considered true Natives for a long time. Matthew Trimking tried to start a school for his people in North Carolina, which his white neighbors promptly burned to the ground. So he fled up North, to New Hampshire, to school at Dartmouth College, where the handful of other black students there refused to socialize with him because he was too little, too dark, too strange.
This last detail I know because of my aforementioned history nerdishness. There is my great-grandfather, in the letters of one of the few black Brahmins, filed and tucked away in an index written by one of the first historians of the black upper classes.
Even before I knew this about my great-grandfather, I was always curious about the past's left-behinds. When I was in high school, I used to spend hours in my bedroom, lying on my bed, lamenting my own shiftlessness. I had been raised on the gospel of denial and sacrifice and bittersweet irony and last-minute tragic reversals: that is, on the gospel of American blackness. I was well aware that my grandparents and great-grandparents had scrubbed floors until their knuckles bled and spent hours minding other women's children so that I could, at fifteen, lie on that futon mattress for hours on end, contemplating my place in space and time and counting up what I owed the past.
I have been to the Smithsonian's new African American history museum twice now. The first time was at the end of October, right before the election, with my sister Kerri. She actually did become a historian — a really great one. She was the one who got me my first job at a black-history site, the Black Heritage Trail in Boston. We were park rangers together. We spent summers sweating in Smokey-the-Bear-style ranger hats, making tourists uneasy by brightly asking, "Are you interested in a walking tour about Boston's black abolitionists?"
She is also aware of the strangeness that black history attracts. The people who gloat on the litany of suffering and the people who want to insist that the suffering probably really wasn't that bad and the people who cling to mythic versions of the past, unwilling to talk about the truly fascinating truth.
When my sister and I walked through the door of the Smithsonian's African American history museum, it was an explosion of blackness, of Us-ness, that made us both giddy. From the avuncular security guard who claimed we weren't on the admission list but shrugged and said "Don't worry about it, pretty girls" to the man in an Obama for President hat who told us about moving from a town near Tupelo, Mississippi, to Gary, Indiana, in the '60s and riding in the back of a bus as a child. His T-shirt read "Triple the Hustle and Double the Heart."
During that initial visit to the museum, my sister and I made it through only the first three floors. The museum begins in the basement, at the start of black identity, with the transatlantic slave trade beginning in the 1400s. As you walk through it, the floor slowly elevates, until you are climbing up and out through history, all the way to 2008 and the election of Barack Obama, and then the "present."
We passed numerous parents with small children, winding their way through the dark and cramped corridors. I watched as a girl, her scalp crisscrossed with cornrows, smiled at her own reflection in a display case, patting at her edges.
To my delight, some of the castoffs of history were here, if obliquely — you had to know enough to figure out where to look. But my sister and I were pleased to see the exhibits made an effort to remind the audience that blackness is not monolithic — there were exhibits on all black settlements, those spaces for freedom most people don't speak about. There were exhibits on blackness in the West versus the North versus the Midwest versus the South. There were exhibits on the freedom farms; on early black-history museums; on black love and marriage, the middle-class and the Bronx.
In one corner, sanctioned off, you could walk through a room containing Emmet Till's casket. This was the one space my sister and I could not bring ourselves to enter. "I can't," she said. "Not today."
But mostly, we were overwhelmed by the fact that this space existed. That it was really here, and full of all of us, all the pieces of us collected and set off for proud display.
We went to the second floor, to look through one of the gaps in the façade, out to the National Mall and the Washington Monument. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught the sight of a tour bus circling the museum. It was Milo Yiannopoulos's bus, "AMERICAN FAGGOT" sprawled across the side. At the time, I told myself to ignore it. "Don't let them ruin this moment." But it was still there, circling, when we went to grab our coats.
Since the election, among all the other terror, I've been worried that this museum would be the first to be on the Republicans' chopping block. When I went back for my second visit, on the second day of February, Donald Trump had just made his Frederick Douglass gaffe. "Did you hear?" my friend Sara asked me. She had been kind enough to get me a second ticket to the place, and we were walking through it together.
"No. Black History Month is a sacred space for me, and I prefer not to indulge any white nonsense during this time," I said, only half-joking. I'd been on edge because a few weeks before, the White House had issued an ominous announcement that Trump had "plans to celebrate Black History Month," and so I had braced myself for what I was sure was going to be some high-level trolling, which is apparently how we've decided we're conducting politics for the foreseeable future.
"You know," Sara persisted, "Trump says he thinks this museum is terrific," and as I walked to the top floors of the place, I could see why. I'd missed this part on my first visit. This is absolutely not shade to the museum—but the top floors are all large flashing screens and glass boxes full of the greatest hits of black entertainment. On the third floor, the first place you enter is an oval reception space, with screens mounted on the curved wall. Impressionistic films about different aspects of black culture — writers, faith, hair — play. The final video is on black hand gestures — just a quick edit of different people slapping palms, doing the Dougie, clapping hands. The final shot is Obama doing his famous "Obama Out" mic drop from the last White House Correspondents' Dinner, which, honestly, is kind of the pinnacle of black American history so far and I think could probably just play on loop in this place and the work would be done here. Every black entertainer and artist you could think of, and some you may have forgotten, seems to make an appearance on those screens, smiling, in their prime.
It's no wonder that Trump would like it up there. It's all success, and joy and triumph, all the time.
We got to the museum late in the day, and we had to leave before we could see all the things we wanted to. A security guard told us it would probably take visiting for six weeks straight to see everything. As we walked out of the museum, we stopped and took pictures in the fading sunlight.
Sara and I went to college together. Back then, we would try to come up with adventures to take, but they never worked out — one of us would flake out on logistics. The one trip we managed to pull of in spite of ourselves was a visit to Atlanta to see the nonagenarian jazz singer Little Jimmy Scott in 2004. Little Jimmy Scott's voice is a pure falsetto, unbroken. No one is sure how he was able to sing that high as a 90-year-old man, but he was. We saw him in the dust, under trees, and waited outside his trailer door to tell him how much his voice meant to us.
We'd flown to Atlanta separately, but on the way home, we went to the airport together. In the ticket line, Sara suddenly turned to me. "They're going to take me out of the security line and search me. They always do," she said. Sara's father is an immigrant from an East African country and this was Bush-era America, so my friend's last name was on a list. "They're going to ask you if you're traveling with me. Just say no."
But in the blustering blitheness of an American, I ignored her. They couldn't possibly search me, I thought. The TSA agent turned to me. "Are you traveling with this woman?" "Yes!" I said, and I was promptly pulled out of line as well. I found my name on security lists for the next three years whenever I tried to fly.
I think about that moment, as we pose for photos in front of the museum. Of the strangeness of American blackness: a position that makes it seem as if this country isn't really mine, but still a place I instinctively claim, an arrogance I am willing to inhabit sometimes. It's the country where white people burned my great-grandfather's ambition to the ground one year, accepted him into a college that is a seat of financial and cultural power the next, and then classified him as a "popcorn seller," not an English professor, in the federal Census a few years after that. The best thing about this museum is that it doesn't try to solve this riddle. Instead, it lets it unfold in all its color and complexity, its contradictions and beauty big enough for you to walk through.
Kaitlyn Greenidge is a contributing writer for Lenny Letter and the author of the novel We Love You, Charlie Freeman. | | | | | | | | | | | | Spaniel Rage | | | | By Vanessa Davis | | |
Vanessa Davis was born in Florida and lives in Los Angeles. She is a cartoonist and illustrator who has contributed to Vice, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Lucky Peach, and Tablet. Spaniel Rage is her latest book with Drawn & Quarterly. | | | | | | | | | | | | True Blue | | | | By Lizzie Harris | | |
On January 31, I stopped by a Rally+Rise lecture on lobbying in New York State, featuring Alessandra Biaggi, the former deputy national-operations director for Hillary for America. Like many liberal Americans, I'd spent the last week absorbing every article, rereading the Constitution, and racing to one march/protest/rally after another.
I went to the event expecting some clear call to action for people like me — people who wanted to give those who are silent or supportive of Donald Trump a piece of their mind. I'd already called our senators, Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, both Democrats, but it had become the epitome of preaching to the choir.
I live in New York: the last time the state went red was for Reagan in 1984, and we've welcomed Dems in the governor's seat for the past decade. I was, like many of us, under the naïve assumption that New York was "safe" and our only fight was at the federal level (we still have many, many fights ahead). I was wrong.
I did leave the night with clear next steps, but it wasn't what I'd expected. Here are my top three takeaways, complete with calls to action.
1. Know your local representative. Really know them.
Contacting representatives when you're not a constituent is useless, as Emily Ellsworth pointed out in Lenny a few months back. Their primary concern is reelection, and you don't factor in. Instead, focus on your state. And each state has its own statehouse with its own byzantine dynamics, which can make the "Democrat" or "Republican" label less reliable than you might think.
In New York, we have the IDC. The IDC is the Independent Democratic Conference, founded in 2011 as a "bipartisan governing coalition" with Senate Republicans. In short, it's Democrats in the state of New York who vote like Republicans — eight of them, to be exact. (This excludes former member Malcolm Smith, who is currently incarcerated for bribing Republican county leaders to secure his spot as a Republican nominee on the New York City mayoral ticket despite his being a registered Democrat.)
Let's do that math. New York has a 63-seat senate: 31 Republicans, 32 Dems. If we re-tally with IDC's voting tendencies: 39 Republicans, 24 Democrats. Here's the full list of NY IDC members. It's no wonder that IDC awareness has increased rapidly post-election, with the New York Times giving it ample attention and constituents mobilizing with sites like noIDCny.org.
The takeaway? Stop voting D down the ballot and start looking into who will represent you in a vote.
2. State constitutions are totally bonkers.
When the Supreme Court rules on something, like, for instance, Roe v. Wade, it passes at a federal level, which means any state-by-state laws fall by the wayside. But it doesn't mean elected officials go back and change the legislation at a state level.
We've all seen listicles along the lines of "The 15 Wackiest Laws Still in the [Insert State] Constitution." But this banana bread goes beyond "You can't wear a fake mustache that causes laughter in church" (Alabama) and "A woman isn't allowed to cut her own hair without her husband's permission" (Michigan — big win). A lot of these laws are horrific and, by today's definition, unconstitutional. For instance, Lawrence v. Texas struck down the existing Texas law making sodomy illegal. The old law still sits in Texas's books; it just can't be enforced, because it's been deemed unconstitutional.
Our move? Read your state's constitution. New York's is 45 pages (of nine-point font). The webpage for California's looks like it was made in 1994. Oregon's includes a section on the appointment of a "state printer." And so on. Log the issues and articles you want to protect in the increasingly likely scenario that they're overturned at the federal level. Start a campaign to secure progress at the state level.
3. State constitutions matter now more than ever.
Let's loop back to Roe v. Wade, the second-best thing to come out of 1973 (pro-choice for life, but Vietnam was a huge fucking mistake). Trump-Pence, Our Twisted Dark Nightmare, will likely aim to overturn it, which doesn't mean abortion is necessarily illegal; it means the law goes back to the states — and wherever your state stands, goes.
New York hasn't updated its law since 1970. To be fair, when it was instated it was the most permissive abortion law in the country and New York established its reputation as a safe haven for women who needed reproductive resources. However, 1970 predates Roe v. Wade, and as a result, our state law is more restrictive than the federal law.
The Reproductive Health Act has been proposed time and time again, but it's never passed the state assembly and senate. It's been reintroduced in 2017, has gone through committee, and a vote is being scheduled. That means we still have time. If this issue matters to you, here's what you should do:
1. Look up who your rep is. If you don't already know, there's no shame in looking. Then, find where they historically stand on passing the RHA.
2. Call your local electeds. Write. Wait in their office lobby. If they're a co-sponsor (like my rep, Velmanette Montgomery), write to thank them and confirm your support. If they're in opposition or silent on the issue, do the same thing, but let them know you're an invested constituent who urges them to vote in favor.
3. Get grizzly. Be the opposition. Again, most elected officials are concerned with one thing: reelection. And many run unopposed. So if you see your rep slacking, threaten to primary them (support a new candidate to run against them).
No matter your state or the state your families reside in, there are battles to be won. Battles we can win. If you're not a New Yorker, find your state's constitution and Electeds online. You can still call and write and, if need be, challenge their reelection. Hell, run yourself if you meet this very loose list of qualifications. Hitting the streets always has value, but to hit this administration where it hurts, we have to start with our own states and work our way up. Remember, your Electeds work for you.
Lizzie Harris is an American poet and the author of Stop Wanting (CSU Poetry, 2014). Follow her at @heylizzieharris. | | | | | | | | | | | | Food That Makes You "Feel Well in Every Sense" | | | | By Laura Tillman | | | |
Elena Reygadas is the owner and head chef of Mexico City's Rosetta, a restaurant so reflective of her personal taste that it's like coming to her home. Set in a large porfiriano mansion in the leafy neighborhood of Roma Norte, diners are spread among its rooms and courtyard, decorated with plants and whimsically painted with birds and flowers. Reygadas, who was named the best female chef in Latin America in 2014, invites you to a space she has lovingly curated, with the goal of making you "feel well in every sense."
Rosetta is an Italian restaurant with Mexican elements. Or perhaps it's a Mexican restaurant with Italian elements. The bread you're served may be focaccia or pan de pulque. Your tagliatelle may be flecked with chile de arbol, your dessert bursting with cactus fruit and cacao or infused with olive oil. Reygadas's voice speaks so clearly through her food that while the flavor combinations may be unexpected, they harmonize as if they've been served together for centuries.
Reygadas has built a small empire, with four restaurants and a baking business that distributes her much-admired bread and pastries through Mexico City. As confidently as she has paired Italian and Mexican cuisine, Reygadas has rebuffed pressure to remake her restaurant in a manner that might elevate her to a still-higher level of fame.
I spoke to Reygadas from a perch above Rosetta's kitchen.
Laura Tillman: When did you realize that you wanted a career as a chef?
Elena Reygadas: I knew I wanted to go to university, and I studied literature. I saw cooking more as a way of life and something I could do even if I had another career. I was very interested in nutrition, and I always cooked for friends and at home. I never stopped cooking. When I was finishing my degree, my brother, he's a filmmaker, his first film he asked me to come and do the catering. That was the first time I cooked with responsibility, with real responsibility. I thought, I think this is what I want to do, I want to cook, but I want to read all my life. I want to be doing this. I want to cook for others, I want to have the responsibility of organizing a meal.
LT: It seems very different to cook for friends as opposed to doing it as a career. What was it about cooking with responsibility that made you realize you actually wanted to do this as your work?
ER: As you said, it's really different that you like to cook, and then that cooking will become your way of living. I never thought, Yes, I like to cook, but it's too much work, or Restaurant life is really difficult. I just felt like, I love the adrenaline; I love the teamwork. And I remember at that point I thought, I love to cook and this is what I want to do, because to read, for me, is something personal and intimate. Of course you can share a book with someone, but when you cook you share that with everybody instantly on every level.
LT: When you were working in London at Locando Locatelli, you decided to return to Mexico City to raise your daughter. Was that a hard decision to make?
ER: It was a really hard decision to make. When I got pregnant, it was a surprise for me. I was really feeling that having a daughter was going to interfere with my career and my cooking, which I loved. I was confused about how I was going to deal, between my daughter and family and my passion. I loved London, I was really happy to live there, but I felt that if I stayed there it was going to be really difficult to continue with my career.
In Mexico it was going to be easier, because I have my mother, my friends, who would help me care for my child, and I was going to be more in my environment, so it was going to be easier to combine both things. In London I was really isolated. I was with my partner and working all the time, which I loved. I'm not antisocial, but I like to be at home, I like to read, I'm not a party person. I just felt that I wanted my daughter to be more in contact with my family, my friends, how I grew up. It was a really, really hard decision, because I was happy where I worked and I was in a stage where I was starting to be given much more responsibility.
I was nostalgic and visualizing what I could do in Mexico with what I learned. I thought, In Mexico, it's a place with so much more opportunity. I remember in London looking at all these vegetables that come from the Mediterranean, from Mexico, and the fruit and everything was coming from outside, except very few things. I thought, You know, in Mexico you find all this but more. When I was in London, I realized how rich we are in Mexico in that sense, and how good it can be for cooks to have such biodiversity. I started to visualize that if I was in Mexico I could do this and this and this and not have to bring food from anywhere else. I liked the idea, but it was my daughter who held me to that. Maybe if I didn't have my daughter, I would have stayed in London.
LT: What was that year like, when you were pregnant and still working in London?
ER: It was a beautiful year. I felt super-healthy and good, so I just kept working normally. Then at some point I just did the bread, because doing the bread I booked up my time, I didn't have to carry heavy things, I was not in the stress of the service. I just kept working, really pregnant, really big. At the very end, when I was seven months pregnant, I was just in the office with the recipes because it was not comfortable. When I came back to Mexico, I started to do small dinners twice a week for friends. It was great because I kind of felt Mexico again — what people liked and what they didn't like about my cooking; I got to know the vendors. It was a really nice time. I started to adapt what I knew to Mexico, and it was really different because of the altitude.
LT: Did you always know that you wanted to have your own restaurant, or do you think you would have been happy to continue to work for other chefs?
ER: I always wanted to have my own restaurant and my own bakery. That was really clear in my mind. I never realized what that implied, the amount of responsibility, the amount of work, the amount of discipline. At that point I felt that I worked a lot, but I didn't have responsibility. All these things change when you become an owner and have your own place. Maybe if I realized that I would never have done it. Because I thought, I'll have my small restaurant and do my things, do this and do that. I never realized, never felt, and never thought of what I have now. It just happened. Then I thought, Oh my God, this is huge.
LT: I'm curious, what was it like to be selected as best "female" chef? Cooking isn't like competitive swimming; there's no inherent reason for a separate category.
ER: I think it's a very awkward thing, because why say female chef? What's the difference between male and female? I think it's a really, really strange situation. I don't think there's a difference between being male and female; it's like the difference between being Ana and Elena. It's more about individuality than gender. I think it's a matter of business. I do think the good side is that many women feel that, because cooking at that level is such a male-dominated area, if you have a family you cannot go there. So in a way I think it's a good prize because many women get encouraged — you can do it. In that way, I appreciate this kind of award. But I do think it's strange to make such a big issue between men and women. I think we can encourage women without this kind of separation.
LT: What have you learned that you wish you could tell a 25-year-old version of yourself, in terms of your relationship with outside approval?
ER: For me, cooking cannot be judged as No. 1, No. 2, No. 3. It's not a career of athleticism. For me, cooking is a way to express who you are and what you care about and what excites you. It's something really personal. My clients come here because they enjoy the feeling in my restaurant. Other clients go to other restaurants because they are attracted to the feeling there. But that doesn't make one No. 1 and the other No. 2. It's like if you prefer blue or white. I would tell young people, really trust in themselves, in what they are and what they like. When you trust that, it comes more naturally. Maybe you will not be on that list because you don't have that kind of profile. But you will have your inner list, with the people who are connected to you in that way.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Laura Tillman is a journalist living in Mexico City. Her first book, The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts: Murder and Memory in an American City, was published in April 2016 by Scribner. | | | | | | | | | | | | Reconciliation | | | | By Melissa Febos | | |
I clenched a fat pill between thumb and forefinger and shoved it into a slippery hunk of hot dog. This method worked until Red learned to extract them. He'd roll the hunk around his mouth and then, proud as a coed tying a cherry stem with her tongue, spit the pill onto the floor before swallowing the meat. I slicked the pills with butter, cream cheese, gravy.
Salami ultimately proved best. Early mornings I'd sandwich the pill between two fatty slices. As its solution dissolved into his soft dog insides, I'd open the cabinet and take my own smaller pill.
I put my dog on Prozac. Or rather, Reconcile, the aptly named canine version of the drug. Truly, it demanded reconciliation with some unpalatable truths, the least of them that I would end up the sort of woman to put her dog on Prozac.
A year earlier, my girlfriend had had a headache. A month later, she still did.
"I can't breathe,"she said, pressing her hand to her forehead. Air hunger, we later learned it was called. I started to feel it, too. Every breath was part gasp.
Her joints began to throb. She was tired and dizzy all of the time. Her skin hurt, she said.
"Where?" I asked.
"Everywhere."
Her diagnosis of late-stage Lyme disease brought relief and a new nightmare — battles with the insurance company and treatments whose side effects rivaled the symptoms of the disease. I was 30 years old and we had been together only one year. I wasn't prepared to take on the role of caretaker. Who ever is? But there was no other choice that I was willing to make.
Red kept close watch on her, fastidiously licking her hands and feet — the couch cushions or his own paws when alone, as if to smooth the disarray our lives had fallen into. I taught my college classes and tended to the administration of our lives. Instead of crying, I went for ten-mile runs through the verdant hills of Central New York. I fell asleep numb, wishing myself better able to face what was happening.
Sometimes as my girlfriend slept, I would lift the blanket to look down at Red, tucked in the cave of our bodies' heat. He'd shift, dragging the nictitating membrane of his eye up just enough to glimpse me, then sigh back to sleep. There is an animal in my bed, I would think, still stoner-stunned every time. A 70-pound beast.
He was beautiful, coated in red fur whose softness people often admired. Skin puppy-loose, it slid over his muscled body in movement. His paws smelled nutty, like Fritos, and every day, I pressed my nose to their cool pads and inhaled. I marveled at him — so alive, so himself, so mine. Why couldn't my love for humans be that simple?
I'm sure I missed the first signs, but I remember when he started following me out of bed in the morning. At eleven years old, he had long been sleeping later than me. Suddenly, he was poking his worried face into the shower as I lathered at 6 a.m., bumping into the back of my knees as I poured my coffee and assembled lecture notes. He was so reluctant to let me out of his sight that I had to push him out the back door to pee before I warmed up the car.
One morning, when I opened the door to let him back inside, he refused. Planted at the far end of the yard, he stared me down, the milky scrim of his cataracts glinting, ears trembling.
"Red!"I snapped. "Come!"He only trembled more furiously. Winter in Central New York comes early and it comes cold. The leaves were frozen together in a crust of dew that crunched underfoot as I marched across the yard. I snapped my fingers inches from his face.
"Come!" Still he refused. I dragged him across the yard by the collar, both of our feet slipping on the icy leaves, my lungs burning.
The next day, the same standoff. When I went to get him, he lay down in protest. I knelt in those frosted leaves, knees throbbing, and dug my arms under his torso — its finely furred belly smudged with wet and dirt — and I hoisted those 70 pounds of him against my chest and carried him in the house.
My girlfriend's treatments progressed, but it was impossible to tell if she improved. The illness had reduced our relationship to its management. On some level, I was glad. It meant that I didn't have to face what else I felt, or no longer felt. I ran for longer and longer stretches, and reacquainted myself with an old eating disorder. This was a rough patch, I thought. I just had to get through it.
One afternoon, I arrived home from school and found a confetti of wood chips on the indoor welcome mat. A concave had been dug out of the wooden door, rimmed by the clear gouges of teeth marks. I touched the ragged splinters, panic in my chest. Red whined and nosed my back. I turned and grasped his head, warm dog breath washing my face.
"What did you do?" I asked. He leaned his head into my hand.
The next morning I dragged a sheet of warped plywood up from the basement, hands chafing on its edges, and leaned it against the door. This required me to slither out, then reach my arm back in to drag the plywood over the doorknob. When I got home that afternoon, my girlfriend watched me snake my hand through the cracked door and heave the board aside.
"This is ridiculous," she said.
"I know."
"There's a drug called Reconcile, and I think Red would be a good candidate for it," said the vet. He explained that the active ingredient in Reconcile is fluoxetine hydrochloride, the same as Prozac. We left with the soothingly aquamarine bottle and a low-dose prescription for Xanax, which Dr. Nickel had advised for particularly "high stress" situations.
I knew that there were people who put their pets on psychotropic medications. I just never thought I'd be one of them. These were people without the strength of character required to accommodate the needs of a voiceless animal, I'd presumed, feeling superior. The kind of people who left "wee-wee" pads by the door when they left for work and dressed their dogs in sweaters, but never bothered to train them. People too self-centered to face the reality that loving well is inextricable from self-sacrifice for the needs of the beloved.
What I hadn't realized was that the needs of our beloveds are not always what we expect, and despite love, we are not always equipped to meet them.
A few weeks later, I reluctantly broached the idea of my taking antidepressants. My therapist agreed that it might be a useful experiment. It seemed like proof that I had failed at my life in some fundamental way. Weren't people born with depression, real depression? I didn't feel very much of anything. I had always gotten by, no matter what. But something had to change. "Where are you?" my girlfriend had started asking. I had no answers. If a pill was the answer, I would take it.
Did it help? I couldn't tell. My hands were drier and I suddenly became a person who napped. I still felt a caving in my chest when I thought about the possibility of going on as we were for an indeterminate future.
Red, however, began to show marked improvement. Though I still had to corral him inside before leaving for work, he began sleeping later. He ate, though reluctantly, and I started feeding him by hand. Donning a medical glove, I'd sit cross-legged next to his dish, scooping handfuls of ground dog food and holding them under his mouth. It was the fastest means of feeding him, but also a satisfying act. Such a direct form of nurture eased the pain of all the ways I could not fix him, or her, or myself.
As my girlfriend's symptoms finally began to recede, we decided to move back to Brooklyn. We missed our community, and the worst part seemed to have passed. I quit my job and we packed the moving van as soon as she was well enough to drive it. I drove the car, Red's velvet head tucked under my arm the whole seven hours. I didn't realize that the pill bottles — both mine and Red's — were gone until the movers finished unpacking the truck.
The vet's office mailed a bottle of Reconcile overnight, but it was the Friday of a holiday weekend, and my doctor's office was closed. For the next three days I waited for a panic greater than that I already felt to seep in. Nothing. I waited a week, then two, and saw no difference in my mood. With relief and disappointment, I understood that whatever my condition, it would not be cured with a pill.
Two months later, I kissed someone else. It was a coward's end. In order to avoid abandoning her, I had stayed. In order to avoid admitting my fears, I had detached from her, and from myself. But experience has taught me that what the mind refuses to face, the body eventually will. I ended up hurting her worse than my honesty would have. I hope it was the last time I ever hurt someone that way.
The day she moved out, Red and I came home to the emptied apartment. We lay on the sun-warmed floor, and I wept for a long time, with heartbreak and relief.
In the months after she left, I watched Red closely. He looked for her every time I walked in the door, but he did not go mad again. At night, he and I curled into each other, two sad beasts, and I stroked his ears, feeling the edges of that new emptiness.
A few months later, I weaned Red off the Reconcile, with no change in his disposition. It was tempting to see his affliction as an extension of my own, to make him a symbol. And I do think that my inability to hold my own grief gave him more to carry. The animals who love us are mirrors, and they do share our burdens, but they are not symbols. They are whole worlds whose edges overlap ours. To love well we must face this truth, and so many others. It is an old truth and a withstanding one: that to care for ourselves equips us to better care for our beloveds. And that means admitting the hard thing. Sometimes, it means saying goodbye.
Two years later, when I said goodbye to my boy, I brought him to the same animal hospital where our family dog had spent her final moments. My mother knelt beside me as I held his head in my lap, both of us sobbing. The kindly woman vet loaded her syringe and asked if I was ready. I pressed my face into his velvet neck and knew that this would be the great heartbreak of my life. I nodded.
Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir Whip Smart and a new essay collection, Abandon Me. More at melissafebos.com. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The email newsletter where there's no such thing as too much information.
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